This
morning I attended a wonderful virtual talk hosted by Hadar and given by one of
my favorite former classmates, Dena Weiss. She spoke about this week’s Torah
portion Hukkat, through the lens of commentary from the Pesikta derav
Kahana 36a (to learn more about this book, ask someone else please!). One line
from the commentary has stuck with me all day and, well, I’m enjoying a wild
insight I’m having about it.
First,
about the parsha and the commentary: In Hukkat, we read the law of the
red heifer, an animal which is sacrificed, burned to ashes, and then those
ashes are used to purify those who have been made ritually impure by contact
with the dead. It’s a famously bizarre law, and in the commentary, Rabbi
Yochanan ben Zakkai is asked about it. First he gives an answer that normalizes
the ritual but when pressed further by his students he says:
“Death
does not defile, nor does water purify, but it is the decree of the Holy One,
blessed be He, who declared, ‘I have issued an ordinance and enacted a decree,
and you are not permitted to question my decree.”
Death does not defile
nor does water purify.
What
a line! I’m obsessed with this line! It’s been in my head all day. So here are
some levels of significance I find in it (with my advance apologies both to
Dena Weiss and Rabbi Yochanan, as I am sure that my own thoughts will be
spiraling further and further away from the intentions and meanings of Rabbinic
thought).
Ok, here we go:
1) On the intended level, I believe (and Dena explained to
us this morning) Rabbi Yochanan is saying that ritual purity is an
arbitrary thing, something that exists by decree rather than in any natural
sense. Ritual purity and impurity are symbolic at best, and so if it
doesn’t make sense, don’t worry, it wasn’t logical in the first place.
2) Now then, let’s approach this text more loosely. When I
read “defile,” I think “ruins.” And in that sense, yeah, death defiles! It
totally defiles. Closeness with death leaves an impact on us. It can
certainly kill a mood, or an appetite. In a physical-experiential sense,
contact with death defiles, and can leave us seeking some way to remove
that feeling. And similarly, water totally purifies! In a literal sense,
it cleanses, but again in a physical-experiential sense, it refreshes. I
take a shower, and I feel new. So, even without “God’s” proclamations
about ritual purity and impurity, I think there’s an instinctive human
sense that death does defile, and water does purify.
3) Follow me as I really co-opt this text for my own
purposes. Now that we’ve established that death does defile and water does
purify, what would it mean to insist that they don’t? Here’s where I go
all atheist-misanthropic on you-- death doesn’t ruin life; it’s f**king
built into life! Death ruins life the way that dish-washing ruins a good
meal-- it’s like, sure, it ruins you if you’re spoiled. Gonna bring this
rant up a notch-- death is a big deal because we make it a big deal,
because, well, we are meaning-making animals, so making things into big
deals is what we do. But, in terms of life as a whole, death’s a piece of
it, and it doesn’t defile. The same goes for water-- it only has meaning
in a human world; otherwise, it’s just another element that does its
thing, and sometimes does its things with other things. Tl;dr: Death
doesn’t defile because defilement is a human construct; water doesn’t purify
because purity is a human construct.
4) And now let’s return to these practices around ritual
purity and impurity. If death doesn’t defile and water doesn’t purify,
then why do them? If everything is meaningless, then why do meaningful
acts? Well, I’ll refer you to #2 above-- whether or not there’s meaning in
the universe, we seem to see/carry it anyhow! Death doesn’t defile, but it
sure feels like it does. Water doesn’t purify, etc. And that’s why “God”
decrees all of this.
5) Ok, one last step-- there is no God, just like there is
no ultimate meaning. In that case, “God” represents our passionate
attempt/insistence that life has meaning, because that’s how we work; it’s
how we get by. The decrees of “God” (our projections of meaning) matter
because we need meaning, whether it’s “out there” or not (it isn’t). We
can navigate life better when we have narratives of defilement and
purification (or your choice of two more updated terms related to downfall
and redemption, etc).
Death defiles -- death does not defile -- death
defiles.
Water purifies -- water does not purify -- water
purifies.
